Colin CornabyMar 5

As someone who has done some font library spelunking and rendering - wanted to write a short thread about the "Harfbuzz is vibe coded now!" thing because I think some reactions are knee-jerk but I think it's a problem for different reasons...

If you don't know, Harfbuzz is a library that takes fonts and turns them into shape data. It doesn't draw them or generate bitmaps, it just decodes the font and gives you the shape.

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz

Show threadColin CornabyMar 5

Because of its limited scope of responsibilities - Harfbuzz has actually been integrated in a lot of places. A healthy ecosystem of renderers grew up around it that can render text to GPUs or bitmaps.

For Harfbuzz 13 - the author seems to have vibe coded bitmap and SVG rendering and stuck it onto the library in an unstable interface. And yes vibe coding finger wag, but also... why? Why tackle a problem that was solved by the healthy ecosystem that built on your library?

Show threadColin CornabyMar 5
I kind of worry the draw of LLMs - especially if you're an open source library maintainer - will just be to throw on a bunch of stuff that bulks up your library that isn't necessary. Part of the draw of Harfbuzz is that if I'm doing something like GPU drawing it's focused on working with my draw system instead of defining its own. And sure I can just ignore all the bitmap and SVG rendering they're throwing on but.... sigh. Why? Why compete against your ecosystem? It's a solved problem.
Show threadowlboy Mar 5

@colincornaby I noticed this in the repo root, and it just feels weird to me that it would be in there…

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/main/xkcd.png

Show threadowlboy 
@colincornaby is it common to put memes in repos? Is this what the kids are doing these days?
Mar 5 at 6:33pmIvory for iOS